The Wrapfruit Harvest

Everything hurt. Caras was fairly sure his body had invented entirely new joints and patches of skin just to ensure that the soreness he was feeling reached new heights of suffering he had never hitherto experienced, in an attempt to teach him to avoid such foolishness in the future.
Knowing himself as well as he did, he rather doubted the lesson would stick.
"Hey, whoa, take it slow, kaldrich." The voice was friendly even as it called him a stranger, and Caras decided against fighting the gentle hand that was laid on his shoulder. "You looked like you had been dragged over the rapids when we found you on the bank. Just give yourself some time. Slow breaths."
He did his best to blink away some of his blindness, but found his eyes partly swollen shut, complaining about even his most feeble attempts at letting light into them. "Where am I?"
"Ooooh, a lowlander kaldrich too, how exotic." The voice chuckled, patting him on the shoulder again to ease him back onto what felt like a bed of furs. "You're on Hurvenya lands, friend. No harm will come to you unless you bring it along yourself."
"Forgive me, friend, but I've heard that before." Caras reached up a hand to feel gingerly at his eyes, and didn't like what he found whatsoever. "For the sake of accurate storytelling when this headache kills me, I wasn't dragged over the rapids, I was thrown. But that's a story for another time."
The voice beside him laughed, but only tentatively, not entirely sure if he was telling the truth or not. "Well, you were the only one we fished out of the river, so you don't need to worry about anyone following you."
"If you had fished them out of the river with me, I'd be less worried than I am right now, not more. If you'd found them, you'd be able to tell me where they are." He finally won the battle with himself to open at least one eye to take in the sights surrounding him, pushing himself up on one elbow to look around the dwelling.
The furs he laid on seemed to be on a kind of wicker frame, judging by the creaking beneath him as he moved. The walls were covered in some kind of pale canvas stretched across straightened tree limbs, painted in brilliant colors that confused what little vision he had. The interior floor was plain, swept earth, with bits of twine hanging down from dozens of spots on the ceiling to hold and support various bits and pieces of daily living. There was a net that seemed to hold folded clothing, another packed with utensils and flatware of clay and polished wood. There were also several strangely translucent containers strung from the ceiling, the exterior of them somewhat dusty and dry in appearance, clouded with age. The contents appeared some kind of dull reddish-orange through the milky outer shell, but his eyes couldn't focus any more than to see that much.
The woman speaking to him, narrow-faced and deep-voiced for his experience, had deep brown skin, several grains of wood darker than his own, and eyes speckled in a hazel of colors that his limited eyesight couldn't adequately observe. Her clothing was every bit as simple and functional as his own durable . . .
"Um, excuse me . . ." he patted himself down belatedly, "but where exactly are my clothes?"
"Oh, the blood is taking some time to soak out of them. Don't worry, it should only be a few days before we get them back to you." The woman's smile seemed to think this was a perfecty reasonable timeline to follow.
"A few . . ." Caras's sudden rise in volume was at odds with the coughing fit that sent him back down onto his spine on the furs, hacking until it felt he would lose the capacity to breathe for good. "A few days? I don't have a few days. I'm sorry, I'm grateful, but I have to get back . . ."
She laughed as she cut him off. "You will not be traveling for some time. Even when you have your clothes back. Here are some you can borrow until yours can be cleaned. Can you walk?"
"I can . . . I have to . . ." He attempted to get up out of the furs and onto his feet. This, the floor informed him as it rushed up to meet his face, was a horrible error in judgment.
"You could have just said no." She helped him back up and into the furs of the bed and back onto his back, readjusting the furs beneath his head to rest him comfortably. "Now you know, you cannot walk, and you need time to heal. Stay here and be comfortable. The harvest is under way, and you will remain until it is finished and we can send you on your way whole again."
He hated to admit how right she was, but his head seemed keen to remain exactly where she had placed it. "I . . . I have to be . . . going . . . but thank you. I'm grateful."
"There. Was that so difficult?" She patted his shoulder and crossed the room to retrieve one of the milky resin containers hanging from the ceiling. With a practiced hand, she took it to another implement hanging in a corner and cut a nozzle in one pinched end, before tipping back the container to consume a taste of whatever was inside. "Ah, that's good, this one kept its hold better than most of the others. I think this was one of Yeneza's mold. I'll have to make sure she's bringing it tomorrow." She brought the strange, ovoid container over to Caras, propping up his head so she could present him with the nozzle. "Here, have some of this. It's more jam than juice at this point, but it'll do you a world of good."
"I don't . . . I'm not . . . I don't need . . ." his protests were drowned out by the jam moving through the nozzle and past his lips, complicated by his weakened state and a complete physical inability to protest as soon as it touched his tongue.
He could never guess afterward quite how much he ate/drank of the jam that he was fed. It both slaked his thirst and filled an ache in his belly that had been lost in the cacophony of pain through the rest of his body that drowned it out. By the time he was finished consuming as much as his rescuer determined necessary, the world was a much more comfortable haze, tinted blue, for some reason, at the edges of his vision.
Mist intruded on the limits of his senses, something he could smell that somehow made the room seem couded with no sign of smoke. There was a ringing in his ears that tasted like apricots, turning the fine, soft feel of the furs beneath him into the scent of cooking hazelnuts. The pain was gone, with too many other sensations to take its place for him to focus on it for a long, long time.
"There you go. That's better now, isn't it?" He was vaguely aware of her patting his head and laying a blanket over him as she got up. "See you after the harvest is finished, lowlander. Pleasant journey."

History

The Hurvenya tribe have been cultivating and harvesting the wrapfruit tree ever since they migrated from the southern plains up into plateau millenia ago. They brought with them their southern cuisine of broad, cultivated fields and large-group participation practices when it comes to both cultivation and food preparation. Since then, there have been a few offshoots from the tribe who have attempted to transplant the practice of the wrapfruit tree to other parts of An Riav, with varying degrees of success.

Execution

Food preparation for the Hurvenya in general is highly ritualistic, with each component piece of their diet tied to a much larger group activity. Once cultivated, harvested, and prepared for storage, the daily practice of meal retrieval and individual preparation is far less community-centric, though many of their meals are taken communally, and follow the same standards of group involvement.
For the practices related to the wrapfruit tree specifically, the steps can be broken down as follows:
1) In the days leading up to Harvest Day, dig away the soil beneath the tree and redirect the stream to wash it out. This process typically takes several days. Place the sap-catching apparatus beneath the tree at all needful points.
The remaining steps take place over the course of a single day, as any delay would allow for the reintroduction of pests and predators removed early in the process.
2) Light the outer branches on fire and watch them burn. Scatters current inhabitants and smokes out insects. This also melts out the sap and allows it to run free down to the collection bins tangled in the roots below.
3) When the outer husk is blackened and burnt through, with no more sap flowing, remove the sap collection bins and set the fruit collection apparatus in place. Once the community is ready, hack away an aperture in the bottom of the tree to begin releasing the fruits. Basket away all the fruit that comes pouring out of the tree. Depending on the size of the tree, this can take anywhere from two to five hours.
4) Finish felling the tree. Take all the interior wood and form it into fires beneath all the cauldrons filled by the fruit. Light them to boil down the fruit into jam.
5) Package the jam in cold-cast resin molds made from the tree's own sap mixed with a few other ingredients. Seal and store indefinitely.
6) The remaining husk of the tree and all remaining materials are burned inside the pit of its own root structure, including any tools made from the tree's own wood that were damaged or broken beyond mending during the harvesting process. A season later, when the pit has had time to rest and the wood of the former tree has had time to decay, five new seedlings are planted in close proximity within the pit, such that in roughly eighty-five years, a single, healthy tree will be ready to harvest.

Components and tools

As much as is possible, the Hurvenya like to make the implements used in the harvesting of a particular plant from that plant itself, the wrapfruit tree being no exception. The spades used to dig out the roots are carved from the tree's hard inner shell of bark, the pans used for collecting sap are long, conical pieces hollowed out from the roots of the tree prior, and the sap of the tree is itself molded and hardened using compounds extracted from some of the tree's own boiled leaves. The only tools utilized in the harvesting process that do not come from the tree itself are the axes used to crack open the trunk to extract the fruit and the cauldrons in which the fruit is afterward reduced to jam.

Participants

The entire tribe attends this particular harvest, aside from those who are tasked with tending the sick or the young or those tasked with watching the tribe's borders. The work of digging out the roots of the tree in order to properly collect the sap involves the entire community, as does the work of catching and carrying away the fruit when it pours out from the trunk. The intervening long burn of the tree's exterior, while not labor intensive, still requires full attention from the tribe in order to keep stray flames from leaping to nearby foliage. During the entire harvesting process, it is traditional that the prior harvest's remains, if any, are consumed by those in attendance. The mild hallucinogenic properties of the fruit, especially when rendered into jam, creates a . . . rather jovial atmosphere for these proceedings.
There are always four predetermined Masters of the wrapfruit proceedings, though this distinction is not a formal one within the hierarchy of the tribe. These harvest leaders are typically appointed by popular acclaim within the community, two of them by those who have had the most experience being directly involved with the harvesting process and two who are being informally trained to have such experience. These four typically work most with the tree directly concerning the proper placement of the sap collection bins and the proper cracking procedure to most optimally remove the fruit inside. One other tribe member, separate from these four, is usually formally appointed as the keeper of the end product, responsible for its safe storage and rationing throughout the seasons to follow until the next harvest is scheduled. Unlike some other food storage responsibilities wthin the tribe, this is a separate duty and a separate storage facility. It is commonly held that this is due to the fruit's hallucinogenic properties, and a desire among the people of the tribe to minimize the risk of such hallucinogenic properties being shared from the final jam product into more mundane ingredients for everyday consumption.

Observance

The rites of the wrapfruit harvest occur only once a year, during the days just past the height of summer, when the fruit has reached its full maturity but the tree has not yet begun to crack. The date itself is never formally set, but it is the responsibility of the one who maintains the final product of the harvest in storage to assess the proper time for harvest for each tree in the tribe's territory. They typically take the four other tribe members who will be the leads on the harvest process itself with them while conducting these assessments in the days leading up to and just beyond midsummer.

Primary Related Location

The Hadalin Plateau

Related Ethnicities

• Lantarin